]]>Cavium, a company more familiar in the networking market, has branched into servers with a new family of chips made using the ARM architecture that is currently inside almost all cell phones and making moves into the data center. The chip maker is introducing a family of chips called ThunderX that will begin manufacturing and being sampled by customers in the fourth quarter of this year.

This product family is based on custom processor cores designed by Cavium in the 28nm process technology under an architectural license from ARM. That’s pretty far down the process node for an ARM-based server chip, making it highly dense and energy efficient. It’s also compliant with ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard which is an attempt to unify the ARM-based chips from different vendors so software built for a Cavium ARM processor will also run on an ARM chip from AMD or Applied Micro.

This is an issue that companies buying servers containing x86 chips didn’t have to worry as much about, given that there were only two vendors. With the ARM model of licensing cores to a variety of chipmakers, it’s conceivable that a company might buy a variety of servers running different versions of the ARM core. As for Cavium, it is offering four different versions of the ThunderX chips for different markets: secure servers, networking, storage and traditional computing.

For those eager to compare specs, the ThunderX system on a chip can scale up to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency and will be fully cache coherent across dual sockets that’s to a Cavium-designed interconnect. The SoC comes with integrate I/O that can offer 100s of gigabits of I/O bandwidth and can support up to 1TB of memory in a dual socket configuration. In short, these processors are aiming to deliver enough computing, memory and I/O on chip and between chips to meet the needs of the scaled out data center where the goal is to pool resources as opposed to manage them discretely.

I think, given the demos I’ve seen of an Applied Micro-built SoC using the ARM architecture running Red Hat’s Linux a few weeks ago and other announcement’s like Cavium’s from ARM and Applied Micro that this year we’ll see more customers kicking the tires on ARM-based processors for computing tasks. And perhaps next year, we’ll even load a few web services that happen to be running on ARM-based processors.

For more on the future of chips in the data center, and how Intel, the current king of the data center chip business, plans to counter ARM’s encroachment come see Intel’s Diane Bryant at Gigaom’s Structure conference June 18 and 19 in San Francisco.

]]>Calxeda might have failed in its quest to sell servers built with ARM-based processors, but there are plenty of people who are confident the ARM architecture will find a home in the data center. In fact, AppliedMicro CEO Paramesh Gopi recently argued as companies like his begin selling brawnier 64-bit ARM processors (as opposed to the 32-bit processors often referred to as “cell phone chips”), the server industry is going to see demand for them blow up.

He made a convincing, albeit self-serving argument in a recent interview (before news broke of Calxeda’s demise), claiming that lots of private cloud deployments built on 32-but ARM are already coming online. The next generation of ARM design — the 64-bit one dubbed ARMv8 (which powers the AppliedMicro X-Gene platform) — has support from software kingpins such as Oracle (around Java development) and Red Hat (around Linux support).

Once Java support is complete, it will be pretty easy to port applications from legacy x86-based servers to ARM-based ones, said Michael Major, AppliedMicro’s vice president of corporate marketing. And, he noted, there’s already work being done to recompile certain applications that require access to the Linux operating system.

Large vendors wouldn’t be putting so many resources into making their compatible with the ARM architecture if it wasn’t “moving the market,” Gopi said. “We’re at the tip of the spear that’s making the market kind of fall over,” he said.

The 64-bit architecture is critical to adoption because it includes more than the 4 gigabytes of addressable memory that many enterprise applications require. However, while many applications require more memory, many — especially web and data-processing apps — don’t often require the computing horsepower the market-dominating Intel Xeon chips provide. The idea of ARM in the data center is so popular in part (arguably entirely) because of how much a lower power footprint could reduce energy consumption.

This all sounds great for anyone building processors based on the ARM architecture but, of course, nothing is that simple — especially when billions of dollars are involved. x86 kingpin Intel has been working to make its Atom processors suitable for server workloads and, although they’re not quite as energy-efficient as ARM chips, it appears to be selling a lot of them inside Dell’s and other vendors’ cloudscale servers. Furthermore, AMD is pushing its SeaMicro fabric-in-a-box servers that contain up to 256 custom-designed Atom processors (although AMD is also working on an ARM-based server).

VMware, another force to be reckoned with in data center software, also isn’t on board with ARM processors right now.

And then there’s market education aspect of selling a new architecture, which includes overcoming the misnomer that ARM-based server processors are “cell phone chips.” Although they’re more energy-efficient than most of their x86 counterparts, they’re not exactly the “wimpy” cores that some have labeled them, Major said. “You can’t do phone chips for servers,” he said. “You need enough [power], but not too much.”

The company clarified that it has closed its office and sent most of its 130 employees home with the exception of a few people to continue to support customers. The product remains available and will be sold/serviced by whatever company takes shape after the restructuring, which will determine what happens to the assets and people. It added:

The market is just materializing, and its a shame that we simply ran out of money at this time. The financing we thought we had lined up disappeared quite suddenly and we ran out of runway to put another deal together.

Calxeda aimed to meet the needs of the webscale market as demand for low-power servers that could perform smaller workloads became interesting to web giants like Google and Facebook. As recently as October it added a Facebook infrastructure executive to its board. Unlike SeaMicro, which was purchased by AMD, Calxeda decided that ARM cores, as opposed to X86 machines were the optimal way to go. At the time of the founding this was a somewhat crazy idea, but soon companies like Marvell and Applied Micro started talking up ARM in the server market as well.

Calxeda, had a deal with HP to build 32-bit servers, but the market for 32-bit machines was limited in the enterprise. It has sold products into the storage market, but struggled on the older-generation 32-bit ARM cores. The plan was always to put out 64-bit ARM-based boxes when those cores were available from ARM. That’s happening this year, but it seems Calxeda couldn’t keep up with its costs against the relatively thin demand for the 32-bit gear.

The company put out a statement that read:

Over the last few years, Calxeda has been a driving force in the industry for low power server processors and fabric-based computing. The concept of a fabric of ARM-based servers challenging the industry giants was not on anyone’s radar screen when we started this journey. Now it is a foregone conclusion that the industry will be transformed forever.

Now it’s time to tackle the next challenge. Carrying the load of industry pioneer has exceeded our ability to continue to operate as we had envisioned. We wanted to let you know that Calxeda has begun a restructuring process. During this process, we remain committed to our customer’s success with ECX-2000 projects that are now underway.

The statement discusses a restructuring and hints at some sort of reformation, but after burning through $100 million it’s unlikely that this is going to be a Phoenix-like rebirth as opposed to someone picking through the ashes of a fire sale.

]]>Applied Micro Circuits, a chip firm that designs silicon parts for the computing and networking world, has spent the last three years making a big bet on the cloud computing market and the ARM architecture. The results began shipping last week, and the product essentially takes networking and computing and crams it all onto one system on a chip.

Dubbed the X-Gene server on a chip, the product has been touted by Applied as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence, the ideal part for webscale users (check out the pic of Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky holding one up) and also the future of Applied Micro. It’s the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip. It’s like shoving the networking and computing vision of the Cisco Unified Computing System on a chip.

This is a big deal. Although the first generation won’t have enough bandwidth to eliminate the need for a switch at the top of a rack, the following generation will.

Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage (the board in the picture uses an FPGA instead of a production silicon) AND are now in the hands of several customers, including Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.

Gopi’s big bet

The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and contains eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores that Applied has designed, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software (the pink bit on the block diagram below), four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives. In short, this a chip that combines networking and computing in one package.

When about asked about the power consumption of the chip, Gopi said it will run at 50 percent of the total cost of ownership of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption.

“We’ll be able to run your LAMP stack and SQL jobs on Xeon-class ARM cores, and the routing protocols and such will be running on the Atom-class ARMs,” Gopi said. “It’s the fundamentals of a rack on a single chip.”

Building this chip has taken four years. It required Gopi to visit ARM at its U.K. headquarters to convince them to give him an architecture license to build a chip for servers. In an interview with me at the Open Compute Summit in January, Gopi explained that he saw the flexibility and the architecture that ARM offered could become an asset for webscale computing, so he embarked on turning Applied Micro, a public company with a few hundred million in revenue, into a startup.

Like others, such as Barry Evans of Calxeda or Andrew Feldman of Sea Micro, he saw that power issues were raising the cost of operating data centers — and cutting into the bottom line at web businesses — and he thought he had a solution. His solution was to get an architectural license from ARM, so he could make a 64-bit-capable chip ahead of ARM’s plans to introduce that powerful a core. ARM introduced that core last year, and vendors of ARM-based server chips such as AMD and Calxeda expect to have 64-bit-capable chips next year. But Applied is shipping those machines today.

The new hardware mindset

Applied Micro CEO Paramesh Gopi.

Gopi has taken advantage of several different trends that are finally coming to fruition. The first trend is the use of the ARM core — ubiquitous in cell phones and tablets — for the enterprise and cloud computing market. But he’s also taking advantage of a more subtle shift happening in the chip world as it pertains to the data center — namely the opening up of the ecosystem.

The mobile industry has relied upon the common ARM architecture to build a wide variety of chips that give each vendor a slightly different set of features. Both Nvidia and Qualcomm start with ARM cores (hell, even Apple has an ARM architectural license) to build their application processors. This lowers the cost of designing chips, because engineers can start from a higher level when solving problems.

And the modularity of the ARM cores combined with an architecture license also means firms can customize their designs for a certain market without spending a huge amount of time or dollars. Gopi will actually address some of this at our Structure event June 19 and 20, in a presentation on designing hardware at the speed of software.

For Applied, this dynamic plays out in the existence of a new type of chip for the data center, but also in the fact that in nine or 12 months Applied plans to test the second-generation X-Gene chip, one that will support 100-Gigabit Ethernet and will obviate the need for a top-of-rack switch. Ironically, this architecture probably won’t be a welcome development for Applied’s existing networking clients like Cisco and Juniper.

But it’s clearly the direction that large webscale customers want to go. And the second-generation architecture is also important for the first-generation X-Gene products, because without it, Applied may not have a chance at getting technically savvy and forward-looking potential customers that need not just a single interesting product, but a real understanding of the roadmap before they commit to a new architecture.

So even as Applied ships these first products to customers for use in devices that hit the market at the end of this year, it’s already developing its production of the next generation 28-nanometer versions of the heavy-duty ARM cores and 100-Gigabit-capable networking while prepping for later versions that may include photonics and other elements that data center customers are already discussing as tomorrow’s technology.

It took a bold vision — and that trip to ARM — for Gopi to get Applied Micro to the table as these discussions about the next generation data center are playing out. But with this design, it has earned a seat. Now all it has to do is earn the business.

]]>Chinese search engine giant Baidu is using ARM-based servers from Marvell making it the first company to depend on servers using the cell-phone chip in a production environment. Baidu is using the new ARM servers in its cloud storage application named Baidu Pan.

ARM, which licenses its IP to a variety of chip makers, had stated its intentions to enter the data center market back in 2010, as worries about energy efficiency increased and the needs of webscale computing customers changed. While less powerful than their Intel counterparts, a cluster of lower-power ARM chips is more power efficient on a performance per watt basis and some workloads don’t even need the performance characteristics of a big Intel core.

The combination of these two trends has led to a plethora of vendors from big names like Marvell and AMD to startups such as Calxeda to license ARM’s cores with an eye toward making servers. Holding ARM back so far has been the delay in building out 64-bit capable cores (they are expected later this year) as well as a lack of enterprise software running on the ARM platform.

But given the economics of these so-called wimpy cores and the limits of using ARM cores in the enterprise server market today, the use of ARM-based servers in the storage arena is not surprising. Storage usage scenarios are perfect in many ways because they don’t need a lot of raw performance, nor do they require 64-bit capable cores.

Thus, Baidu using ARM for storage makes sense. It’s also an area where Calxeda expects to see its first production deployments sometime this year, according to a conversation I had with Karl Freund, the VP of marketing of Calxeda last December. As for the Baidu deployment, it’s using the quad-core Armada CPU, Marvell’s storage controller, and a 10Gb Ethernet switch all integrated on a single system on a chip.

Marvell’s release says the chip firm customized the ARM servers specifically for Baidu’s cloud storage requirements, taking the concept of server customization common in webscale deployments to the chip level. Marvell says the platform is designed to increase the amount of storage for conventional 2U chassis up to 96 TB, and to lower the total cost of ownership by 25 percent, compared with previous x86-based server solutions. The end result should cut Baidu’s power in its data center by half according to the release.

]]>Calxeda, the Austin, Texas-based startup that is building out highly dense, low power ARM-based servers has a new market in the storage world. During a visit last week to the company’s headquarters, company executives shared that in addition to web hosting and big data applications it sees a near-term opportunity in the storage world and that is has fielded more than 20 requests for proposals for systems using ARM-based processors.

Karl Freund, the VP of marketing for Calxeda, says the company has shipped about 3,000 nodes and 130 systems although none are deployed in production environments yet. He expects the first production deployments to occur at the end of the second quarter of 2013. But most of the conversation was about how ARM-based systems could be used today in the storage market. Not just for cold storage such as Amazon’s Glacier or Facebook’s photo storage effort, but even for the big storage systems for scale out storage and enterprise class storage appliances. Named customers who are evaluating the systems include Scale.io, Gluster and Inktank, the storage startup backed by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame that is commercializing Ceph.

There are more, notes Freund, (pictured) who says that when Calxeda servers make it into production environments, they will likely be deployed first in a storage capacity, as storage customers don’t care if the chips are 64-bit compatible. For now, ARM-based systems are stuck only able to address less memory because ARM only has a 32-bit capable core design. Next year ARM will have a 64-bit capable design and systems will be built around them in 2014 (maybe even late 2013). Calxeda plans its 64-bit capable SoC for 2014.

But Calxeda isn’t waiting and in storage, it’s also not focusing on power consumption — the initial draw for ARM-based servers in the scale out data center. For the storage world, where spinning hard drives tends to suck huge quantities of electricity, adding a low-power has a negligable affect on the consumption of an overall system. However, Calxeda boasts that popping in more of its systems on a chip (SoC) are both cheaper and make for faster information transfer and retrieval.

Its tests show roughly a 4X improvement in IOPs for a rack of Calxeda SoCs versus x86-based systems. Adding Calexeda’s SoCs also cuts complexity because the entire system of processing and networking components are integrated on the SoC, and the terabit-plus fabric between cores also offers more network capacity between cores in a system –the so-called east-west networking traffic.

As the market for scale out computing, storage and networking changes the demands made on IT equipment, Calxeda and others are seeing an opportunity that may have begun in servers and the cloud computing environment, but certainly isn’t stopping there. No wonder Intel is trying to catch up with chips of its own. So far, it’s recently announced new Atom-based chips haven’t made the cut for most customers I’ve spoken with (the lack of integration of the entworking and processing hardware is a problem), but in 2014 it will have a new, integrated SoC as well. Then, the competition will really get interesting.

]]>Texas Instruments, the company behind the Speak & Spell and the application processor in the Kindle, is joining the ARM-based server crush with a series of processor cores that will use the ARM IP from its cell phone business as well as its own digital signal processing chips to deliver high performance computing power to the data center. What’s most interesting about its foray into the data center market is that its cores also come with networking integrated onto the chip. The server chips are part of a series of chips that TI is calling its KeyStone multicore architecture.

This means that not only is TI confident that there’s a market for a new type of high performance computing chip (as well as one for webscale and cloud providers), but that TI thinks that integrating up to five 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports on that chip will make it more ideal for the new demands on data centers. As Tom Flanagan, the director of multicore strategy at TI said, the integration of 10-Gigabit Ethernet on the system on a chip means that the top-of-rack switch could be rendered moot.

Others are also thinking about the future of the top-of-rack chip, especially in scale-out data centers where traffic doesn’t stay confined to a rack but needs to communicate with servers in racks across mammoth data centers. For example, Frank Frankovsky of Facebook has said he’s trying to think outside that architecture. Facebook has also stepped up to support the developing ARM-based server ecosystem, appearing onstage as AMD said it would license the ARM core for server chips and joining an industry group aimed at building software for ARM servers.

The KeyStone purpose-built server architecture.

The integration of networking onto a single die (or chip) is an architecture that Intel talked up at its developer conference in September, but it plans to integrate 100 gigabit networking on the chip and it plans to do this by some unspecified future time. Texas Instruments says it is sampling its KeyStone architecture-based chips and they will be ready for servers by next year. Unlike some of the recent announcements from ARM partners in the server arena, TI plans to use the existing 32-bit ARM A15 processor cores married to its math-oriented digital signal processing chips, as opposed to the next generation A-50 cores that support 64-bit computing, but won’t be ready for servers until late in 2013 or early 2014.

Servers aren’t the only area where TI is trying out the ARM+DSP combo. It plans to use them for sensor-based chips as well as in normal networking equipment — both industries where TI has a long history. I have no idea if Texas Instruments can make DSP chips inside servers happen (the company has been talking this up since 2009) but the marriage of DSP and ARM, as well as integrated networking seems to offer a powerful product for real-time data analysis where you want to move and process a lot of information in parallel quickly.

AMD will license the ARM chip technology as part of a strategy that will bring cell phone chips into its servers. The company on Monday announced that it will design 64-bit ARM technology-based processors in addition to its x86 processors for multiple markets — hoping to cater to the needs of data center and cloud-centric companies looking for low power computing.

At a press conference on Monday AMD CEO Rory Read said, “Modern cloud is the killer app and it is bringing about the fastest growth across the industry.” He is convinced that ARM and AMD “can change the server and data center landscape.”

In a press statement to accompany the news conference, Reed added:

“Through our collaboration with ARM, we are building on AMD’s rich IP portfolio, including our deep 64-bit processor knowledge and industry-leading AMDSeaMicro Freedom supercompute fabric, to offer the most flexible and complete processing solutions for the modern data center.”

ARM, through its various partnerships, has been slowly gnawing at Intel’s dominance of the chip business, thanks in part to the booming demand for smartphones and other such devices. ARM has been lusting to take a piece of the server business, giving Intel more headaches. AMD, is a perfect partner for such an assault. The chips are likely to be made available in 2014, according to AMD executives.

We’ve been anticipating this move for some time, ever since AMD purchased SeaMicro, a startup that builds ultra-dense low-power servers for cloud computing that use Intel’s low-power Atom chips. SeaMicro uses x86-based chips for its boxes, but it has a technology that enables it to use any type of processor, including ARM-based cores.

The transition to alternative forms of computing in the data center has come about in some market segments, because certain jobs need less computing horsepower to complete their tasks and data center operators are looking for the most energy-efficient processor for the job. Just like you might not take your 12-cylinder Lamborghini to the grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk, the data center guys are increasingly seeing high-end general purpose CPUs as appropriate for some tasks, but overkill for others.

ARM has seen the opportunity for so-called wimpy cores, and has invested in Calxeda, a systems maker that is building a new type of servers using ARM-based SoCs. Dell, HP and others are also getting in on the ARM-server market with new products using chips from Calxeda, Marvell, Applied Micro, and perhaps even Cavium. Now that AMD has jumped on the bandwagon and with ARM servers in production later this year, getting ARM into the data center is looking more and more likely. Your move Intel.